davidw: dyork lives here in the Ottawa area. Out west, the Canada
US
border is along the 49th parallel line. here in the east, it is
further south, in fact Windsor Ontario is NORTH of Detroit Michigan. I live in Stittsville, which is south of Ottawa
proper, and the nearest major intersection to my house (Hazeldean and Carp Roads) is at 45.26 N

Marcus: gav of
Transgaming has been playing and writing computer Games since he
was 4 years old. (I worked for his father at one time - even at age 4 Gav prefered the Apple ][ to the Commodore
PET.). I doubt that his
business plan is evil,
as it is taken quite liberaly from the postscript book. He has stated
that he intends to fully open all the transgaming code after he gets enough subsciption revenue to cover each part
of it. If he can make this plan work, I say more power to him.

In other non-news. Took the week off between Xmas and New Years, and got another wall up on my
darkroom
project. (of course it will not keep the dark in until it has wallboard on it. - which comes after wiring and plumbing)

I have lots of little electrical boxes to stuff with NMD-90 and products of the
Leviton company. I got mildly anoyed with the ones I bought
however.

It used to be that switches and outlets sold in Canada had screws with a
Roberson SCRULOX head, which allows one to just put the
screw on the driver, and it will stay in place while you navigate it to where you are installing it. These new
switches
and outlets have a combination screw head that will work with a Philips, straight or Robertson driver, but since so
much of the Robertson head is cut away to allow the use of the Philips driver, it will no longer stay on the
Roberson
driver if you hold it horizonally. Seems that they now make them in Mexico for the entire NAFTA area, and
electricans in the US are more likely to have a philips screwdriver. I find that the philips screws strip their heads
after a couple of uses. - the Philips driver is almost DESIGNED to Cam-out and strip the head if you try to force it.

What does my rant today have to do with software? I guess it does point out that sometimes it is better to
have several interchangable modules that can be selected rather than a gigantic interface that tries to do all things
for all people.

The answer to very high light bulbs is a gismo that goes on to a broom
stick. It was a springy rubber end that grips the bulb, and you (yes even someone your size :) can
reach the highest bulb. An American outfit shows one
Here

Me:

I have been doing much plotting on my "Build a Darkroom" project. Having a
space that is 9ft, 7 inches before I install drywall means that I can't just prop a standard Kitchen Style counter up on
sawhorses, and I will have to do some real plotting in the Kitchen Department of
IKEA or Home Depot before I
visit Laurysen Kitchens on Carp Road.

No one should be really upset
about the number of Linux® companies that have indicated that they are in having to restucture. When
Linux® achieves world domination, there will probaly be no need to have companies dedicated to Linux®
itself. It will instead be part of the world infrastucture, and mirror sites will be run as part of other enterprises or
Government projects. The Kernal hackers will still get paid, as part of their jobs building/maintaining the
infrastucture that their employers use.

The trick is just to manage the transition in the meantime, so that we don't arrive at the end state before the
world is really for it. You could run out of resources before everything is in place.

Time zones

got out the old
FRG-7 on the weekend to update the clocks.
I figure if I am going to reset them, I may as well compare them to
CHU in downtown Barhaven to be sure. Of course
this morning, I noticed that my watch is still on daylight time.

as goingware says here are actually 5 1/2 time zones in Canada, the
provinces to
the east of the USA use either use Atlantic time, or Newfoundland time. Which are one hour or one and a
half-hours respectfully away from Eastern time. With the ExpressVue TV I often use this difference to watch a
program on a Halifax station an hour before it turns up on my local TV station. One also has three chances to
catch
the show you miss localy, by watching via winipeg, calgary or vancouver.

Spyware

My wife has installed Bell expressvue as an alternative to cable tv. The set top box
is supposed to be connected to the phone line so it can call home, but we were told that we did not have to do that
unless we want pay-per-view.

The darn thing has reached the point where you can hear a little relay clicking
about every hour trying to see if it can get a dialtone. I really wonder what it is trying to tell MaBell about us.

Neighbours

Walking the dog last night by Derik Burney's House, I see he has changed cars
again.
Corel probaly pays for it. I guess when you hobknob with billg you need a
Cadillac.

Update: The Truck is back, I always respect an engineer who drives a truck more that one who drives
a Caddy. maybe there is hope for Corel yet.

The Business of Open Source Software

I found out by accident about the
BOSS conference taking place on
November 25th of 2001. Looks like it might be interesting.

I will say that I am relieved that Bush is conducting some study before he takes action. I did have nightmares
of B-52s dropping the big one on random populations.

I was pleasantly surprised at the sheer number of folks that turned out on The Hill for the memorial service today.
(See the CBC
coverage)

Iain:
Canada actually has set out in its constitution the
goals of Peace, Order and Good Government.
Sometimes abreviated as POGG. Our last crisis that was anywhere near as serious was back in October of
1970. We do tend to value keeping things on an even
keel.

nmw: I am afraid that you are showing to someone outside the USA the exact
attitude that
makes some folks angry at americans...

The U.S. has done the following good deeds during the last 60 or so years:

Entered and won WWII

If you were to not study history from the Hollywood version, you would realize that the US was a late entrant,
and while they certainly helped, they did not "win" the war. I think we can credit the Brits for
that. (and
being a Canadian, I can think of a lot of credit Canada could but normaly does not claim for the result.) The battle
of Malta that my father in law fought in was a anglo-canadian co production from the outset for example.

Lifted Europe and Japan from the ashes of WWII's ruins

The marshall plan was brilliant, and the US has been a real friend of Japan, but I suspect that the
europeans may wish to claim credit for some of their gains themselves...

I really don't want to rant about this, and the USA is our counties closest ally in good times and bad, but
you
really should hear how what you posted sounds to ears outside the "You Nice States". I am sorry if any
Yankee takes this as a negative posting. Today the paper published a US flag that is curently displayed in the
window of the spare bedroom, to go along with my Canadian flag on my front lawn which has been flying at
half-staff since I phoned home to tell my wife about the news bulletin on tuesday morning.

sethcohn: I have been comparing the coverage from
both
BBC World and
CNN and I will agree that the BBC is far more insightfull, even though the
coverage was dependant on ABC for much of the footage. The difference is that the BBC knows that their
viewers
are all over the world and depend on the BBC to be a non-biased source of facts, while CNN probably is only
really
concerned with the American market. The Economist is also well
known
for good coverage of issues.

Anyway it has been a very hard week, and I sure hope that the dust clears and we can all get on with creating
peace.

Actually, I have been building a few thoughts after OLS,
and I think that their may be a bit of insight that comes
from some of the things that I saw and observered over the
last week.

zeevon I was amused to see from one of
your
entries
that
you actually attended the same group of talks that I
was at on that day, and yet I have no idea concerning what
you look like. Thinking of that had me come to a
general conclusion, that was reenforeced by other entries
that I saw while at OLS.

For example dyork says: One of the
developers, who
had been at the office all day says, "Hey, Dan,
I
heard your talk went great." I ask how he had
heard that. He says, "Oh, I was chatting on IRC
with
people in the audience while you were
speaking!" Sheesh... welcome to the world of
the
wireless LAN! :-)

I got thinking about one of
ottawaDave's
entries from last week.
- He says that The people who make this
sub-culture are people that really like
communicating, reading and writing, with the written
word.

I looked around while I was using the telephone just
outside room C at OLS and I saw a large room filed with
folks all sitting down with laptop computers all connected
to the wireless LAN, all busily typing away. The major
sound in the room was in fact the clattering of keyboards,
rather than the hubbub of conversation.

When I mentioned that observation to my wife, she was at
first taken aback, because one of the traditional
meanings of a conference is as a gathering where folks can
interact face to face and share ideas. At OLS I was
seeing a virtual conference, that happened to have a large
number of people gathered in one room.

Walking by the couches in the room, one could catch a
glimpse of laptop screen, which generaly had 4 white
on black text windows, with at least one of them scrolling
franticaly. Beween my respect for privacy and the fact
that my eyes are not as good as they used to be, I did not
determine the contents of those screens, but the image
came back to me at Teds Keynote talk.

Ted did a history of Linux, and explained how close we
are, and yet how far from the goal of "World
Domination". His talk featured many places where our
systems have ugly edges that we have overlooked in
our quest to fix the major bugs. His sugestion to the
audiance was to work with non-techies to reach a point where
you could unleash your applications on your grandparents,
and expect them to be able to figure out how to use
them.

Of course when he said that, the image of all those
laptops with the DOS style text windows flashed back to my
mind, I would not be happy working that way, many of the
folks I know would consider that sort of interface
"Quaint" to say the least.

My summary of the symposium is that we are very close to
having a product that can take on the world,
Much closer than we were last year. On the other
hand last year we were not in the guns of M$, this year we
have a lot of technological cannons, starting with HailStorm
aiming at us.

dyork: Speaking of the coverage of technical issues
in
The Citizen - did you see this muddled
article about security issues.

The only good thing that I see is that it might be a chance
for some security consultants to have a talk to them.

An example:One of the most dangerous worms on the Web today is
called Back Orifice, which has been wreaking havoc on
personal computer systems for more than a year now.

AFAIK Back Orifice is not a worm!

and equally priceless: People who are using popular Internet services such as
Napster and ICQ, which promote the sharing of files among
an online community, are the easiest targets.....
"If you lie down with dogs you are going to get up with
fleas,"

With all the wrong busswords used, one wonders if
this is some FUD sent in to discourage them from
finaly covering the
OLS this year.

They managed to only write one
rather bizzare article about alan after the first one,
and almost no coverage after the second one.

Speaking about OLS, I have put in my leave slip, and I am looking forward to
spending a few days with some bright people (at least brighter than some that I work with) for a change. I am
somewhat tempted to
try to see if I can get an affordable (ie P133) laptop to take with me, although I am not likly to be satified with any
that I can afford.

Phoon: Your hint was all
that was needed to figure out that a change was posible. Hopefully, the
group is adult enough that folks won't muddy the playground.
It kind of reminds me of the old
alt.hack newsgroup where you had to
know how to fake a moderated posting in order to post an article. I
will say that there are a few projects I would like to list myself as
"user".

avi: ishamael is correct,
from what I have seen. There are 4 hard coded masters including
alan and raph - The nearer you
are to someone certified by them, the better chance you will reach
a higher level. If alan for example were to come and certify one person,
all the folks that person certifed would likely come up.